The New Chinese Conquest of the West

Even in Princeton, a college town reputed for its influence all over the world, this was rather shocking: this year, German classes in high schools have been discontinued. Indefinitely. In their place, Mandarin classes have been planned as a first or second language for high school students preparing to receive their diploma. If WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant] American students — otherwise known as the white descendants of the founding fathers of America — are henceforth going to be favoring the study of Chinese to one of the most principal European business languages, it’s obviously because business is now going to be mostly done between them and Singapore or Shanghai, much more so than with Frankfurt, Paris or even London.

But this is also a reflection of the spectacular influx of Chinese — mostly second generation — in universities and positions of responsibility. It’s already the case on the West Coast, where cities like Seattle or Vancouver have had, for quite a while now, a much higher proportion of Asians in their populations than Blacks. And the wave is now coming up to the East Coast. “In accordance with the excellence of their university results, the quality of their initiative, their innovation, and their high levels of attendance, Asians are becoming the American connective tissue that the Jewish were in the ‘30s through the ‘50s,” says an American university faculty member who now teaches at Princeton. And the similarity is so strong that they have a growing influence even in the musical world. Get used to it: the Leonard Bernsteins of today have “slanted eyes.”

An Influx That Could Start to Cause Some Problems

This conquest of the West à la Chinoise has an origin: a law from 1965 revising the very restrictive immigration conditions applied since 1924. But in the middle of the 1960s, the senators and representatives thought that the criteria established in this new law — professional or university qualification, or the presence of a contact in the United States — would facilitate immigration from Eastern Europe. Instead, the Asians were the ones to come: the Japanese, Vietnamese, Koreans and, now, Chinese.

Admittedly, the United States has seen other waves of immigration before this one, and its strength — deriving in part from its continental size — is to know exactly how to absorb these new arrivals into the American melting pot. At the same time though, this influx, whose second generation is aiming to reach elite status, could start to cause some problems. It seems that, without officially recognizing it, American universities that have applied the affirmative action system since 1978 to admit minority students have started to pull back a bit due to the large number of applications from Asian students. Let’s call a cat a cat, shall we? Or better yet, in French, let’s call it what it is: discrimination.